As we expressed in our other major 2018 catch-up feature, it’s a fool’s errand to try and cover every worthy release from a particular genre in a given calendar year.…
A few months after the release of her self-titled debut, a then fresh-faced Madonna went on American Bandstand to perform one of her album’s biggest hits:…
In taking on the horrors of Vietnam, Brian De Palma’s Casualties of War may be said to mark a departure for the American director of…
Music to Draw To: Io is an hour-plus of carefully wrought, beat-light technical wizardry; it’s an album devoted to childlike wonder, so much so that it…
As far as contemporary pop stars go, Future was always somehow simultaneously the surest, and the least sure, bet: In the context of current rap, his success makes perfect sense,…
James Blake sings the quiet parts loud; now a decade into his career, his arc is best charted through the evolution, and presentation, of his own introversion. Blake’s…
Before the eye paint, the brain-dead political anthems, and their embrace of radio-friendly sensibilities, Green Day was a raggedy assembled trio of stoner misfits with…
Any talk of this film would be remiss without mention of its legendary tagline: “He came into town with his cock in his hand, and…
Through its ongoing effort to inundate viewers with as much content as possible, Netflix presents Revenger, a mostly boring action movie starring Bruce Khan, a stunt man and former Jackie…
“Seen through the wrong end of a telescope, an ordinary scene becomes an ancient story. No, it’s not nostalgia! It’s heartache for all that’s lost.”…
Pavement’s debut album, a sui generis cornucopia of fuzz-box riffs and unwonted lyrics, opens with the best song the band ever recorded, maybe the best…
“This is the feverish, painful expression of a man who lives in mortal fear of his own mediocrity,” concludes Dave Kehr’s negative Chicago Reader review…
In the U.S., the films of Japanese director Naomi Kawase have often been met with apprehension, not accorded the same respect as other celebrated works from the European…
There’s a lengthy, terrific scene in Glass, in which the protagonists — three people with extraordinary abilities — are confronted both by each other and by…
The first of the two albums that Iggy Pop and David Bowie recorded during 1977, The Idiot is, in a sense, a David Bowie album, just…
Trying to cover every rap album, mixtape, EP, collaborative project, and “selective playlist” released over the past year seems like a fool’s errand; in 2018…
The decade of the Great Depression saw a slump in high-end Western productions. This indigenous genre had been immensely popular with audiences of the two…
The first feature from French-Algerian visual artist Neïl Beloufa is an odd hybrid of comic arthouse thriller and Brechtian installation piece. Set in a shabby 1970s-chic Parisian…
The albums that defined the past year were projects that subverted typical genre norms and traditionalist views, making themselves hard to rigidly categorize in the process.…
Galaxie 500 is often labeled as a “shoegaze” band, which is understandable: their indolent, undeviating style (gently distorted guitars committing to one riff, one obsessive,…